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Rosh Hashanah has brisket, Hanukkah has latkes, Purim has hamantaschen—Sukkot even has a weird-looking lemon. But there is one Jewish holiday that’s explicitly not about food: Yom Kippur. Unless you grew up in my family.

On the eve of this Jewish day of atonement and fasting, my parents, my sister, and I would walk home from Kol Nidre at the local high school, where our synagogue held services for the “overflow” crowd. The four of us, now a couple hours into a barely 24-hour fast that nonetheless felt like an eternity, would form an assembly line in the kitchen for an annual tradition: making the pletzels.

It was usually my dad who sliced the oversized, bialy-like, poppy-seed-showered flatbreads known as pletzels, which had been picked up earlier that day from New York Bagel & Bialy in Skokie, Illinois. At some point in my youth, my mom must have been the designated slicer, because on the rare occasion that I find myself cutting a pletzel horizontally, attempting to form even halves without removing large swaths of my hand, I hear my dad’s voice as he stared at my mom in fear, muttering, “Jill”—that’s my mom’s name—”please, be careful.”

Meanwhile, my mom regulated the cream cheese. She would spread a very thin layer over the bottom half of each pletzel. Her insistence on spreading cream cheese on only one side of the pletzel was a major source of contention between us because (a) in order to have the proper ratio of cream cheese to bread, it is (obviously) essential to spread it on both sides, and (b) I really like cream cheese. She never relented. On top of the cream cheese, she placed a few pieces of nova lox, which I once saw her remove and defrost from the freezer. (My mom perceives her greatest achievement as having stocked enough food in her freezer that she can one day cater her own shiva, in case you’d like some deep insights into my family background.)

My sister and I were primarily responsible for adding four tomato slices (one in each quadrant of the round bread), thinly sliced cucumbers and onions, and a sprinkling of grated cheese (usually mozzarella) to each bread half. Then one of my parents would carefully line up the top and bottom pletzel halves, noting the arrangement of the tomatoes so that each quarter would have exactly one slice. The quarters were then rearranged into a whole, wrapped in foil, and stored in the fridge until the following evening, when my mom would bake them (in the foil) at 350 degrees until the bread was toasty and the cheese melted, melding with the cream cheese and emerging into the world as some sort of Jewish pizza-bagel. Family friends would rush in as their services at various synagogues wrapped up, and my mom would bake off dozens of pletzels (the same word applies to the bread and the sandwich made from it, at least as far as I know) throughout the night. Pletzels, I was sure, were as traditional a Jewish food as gefilte fish or latkes. So you can imagine the shock, pain, and confusion I felt when I learned that practically no one outside of the families in my parents’ break-the-fast circle had ever heard of them.

“Where did the pletzel come from?” Not a rhetorical question: I was on the phone with my mom.

“The recipe came from Mimi Levine, who grew up in Romania,” my mom explained.

I heard my dad in the background. “Bulgaria, Jill!”

My mom, who has been making pletzels for every year of my life that I can remember, could offer no further information on the pletzels’ provenance. “Donna Kahan will know,” she said.

Ten minutes later, I had an email from Donna, one of my late grandmother Elaine’s closest friends: “Pletzels. Slide across and watch your fingers. Add—”

Oh god, what had I gotten myself into? And yet I read on with curiosity. “Cream cheese, cucumber, tomato, nova, a little raw sweet onion, and top with Velveeta cheese. That was Mimi’s way. I can’t abide feeding people I love Velveeta, so I use a good American cheese. Cut them in about six pieces.”

I have to insert here that my family went for the larger, four-piece division.

“Wrap in foil which has been sprayed with Pam.”

I think this step might be unnecessary.

“They’re really good. A big patchke to make but worth it.”

Patchke is a classic Yiddish word essentially meaning, Who has the time for this?

It turns out, before I was born, my parents broke the fast at Mimi’s house along with Donna, and Mimi would make these pletzels every year. So there must have been other families eating pletzels post–Yom Kippur, right? Mimi didn’t invent the pletzel—or I guess, to draw a distinction here, the pletzel sandwich—did she? This dish (if you can even call something as simple as an oversize bagel sandwich with some cheese on it a dish) seemed too iconic to me to have no larger place in history.

“Are you there, Joan Nathan?” I asked Google, in slightly different search terms. As it turns out, Nathan had published a recipe for pletzels (breads) in 2004, but it was an article she wrote for the New York Times about one Rebecca Peltz, a Holocaust survivor born in Poland, that offered more insights. “Mrs. Peltz’s specialties are known to Jews throughout Milwaukee,” wrote Nathan, “especially her signature pletzel, a flat bread studded with poppy seeds and onions….Pletzel is a flat roll, of which there were about 18 varieties in Poland….Like the bialy, a form of pletzel from Bialystok, her tzibele pletzel (onion pletzel) is studded with onions and poppy seeds, but it is flatter than the bialy and made from a sweet dough formed into a round, rolled out very thin and then pricked with a fork. A larger pletzel, called an onion board in this country, can be bought at stores like Kossar’s and Zabar’s in New York. Often slathered with goose fat, pletzlach (the plural) were a specialty of Jewish bakers in Zamosc and other cities, sold hot from pushcarts with bagels.”

Slathered with goose fat? The more I learned about pletzels, the more I understood my gut connection to them. Mimi’s version, which was passed down to my mom, carried traces of the Old Country and the New Country (Velveeta—amazing). Pletzels have come so far; who knows where they’ll go from here?

After carefully slicing the bread in half, it's time to spread the cream cheese. My mom is looking on in horror at the amount used in this photo.